Steve Jobs Resigns, A Look Into The Man Who Started It All

Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO. He will remain as Chairman of the Board. Tim Cook is Apple’s new CEO. Jobs, 56, submitted his resignation to the Apple board of directors on Wednesday. Tim Cook is tabbed as his replacement. In a letter announcing his resignation, Jobs asked to remain chairman of the board and an Apple employee.

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I

would be the first to let you know,” Jobs wrote. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

While analysts indicate this shouldn’t affect Apple in the short term, let me stress short term. It’s my belief that someone like Steve Jobs isn’t someone you can replace. Visionaries like Jobs only come along so often. Expect the long term to be a much more difficult road for Apple. We knew the day was coming soon when Jobs would step down, yet it is something maybe you can never prepare for. The silver lining is that he will remain on as Chairman so at least his vision will be there for a little more time.

I pull from Steve Jobs keynote to Stanford seniors in 2005, because I feel it catches the moment and epitomizes the icon that is Jobs. Jobs career and contribution to society will be talked about just like we talk about Rockefeller & Walt Disney.

Steve Jobs gave similar advice to graduating Stanford students:

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn’t all romantic: I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.

And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.

Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac.

It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking back ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking back. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life…

… This (cancer diagnosis) was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful, but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.

And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited; so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Then somehow know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”